(3 of 5)
The Robe ($2.75) is a simple, 700-page novel laid in the time of Christ, by a prolific writer of moral tales whose messages are so direct and earnest that they embarrass most reviewers. The Apostle ($3) is a fictional reconstruction of the life & times of St. Paul.
New Novelists. It was a bumper year for best-selling first novelists (most of them women) and writers with one or two books already published who switched from the remainder lists to the best-seller lists. Among the former were: Betty Smith, whose A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ($2.75) sold 460,000 copies in four months, Ilka Chase (In Bed We Cry, $2.50), Elizabeth Janeway (The Walsh Girls, $2.50), Helen Howe (The Whole Heart, $2.50), Allan Seager (Equinox, $2.75). Notable among the second group were Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, $3) and Christine Weston, who with two unknown novels to her all but unknown literary credit, turned out Indigo ($2.50), which reviewers compared with E. M. Forster's A Passage to India.
Old-Timers continued to grind out novels in 1943. John P. Marquand published So Little Time ($2.75), a sad, bland tale of a polished but warm-hearted literary hack whose success cost him his self-respect. Upton Sinclair's Wide Is the Gate ($3), his 63rd book, carried his almost legendary Lanny Budd through the corrupt vicissitudes of Europe between wars. Sinclair Lewis' Gideon Planish ($2.50), a withering blast at phony philanthropists and do-gooders, awoke pale memories of Elmer Gantry. With The Forest and the Fort ($2.50), Anthony Adverse's Hervey Allen hewed out Vol. I of a projected six-volume epic novel about American life from Colonial days to the Civil War. In Thunderhead ($2.75), Mary O'Hara told, with delicate feeling for animals, a very human life story of a horse, a sequel to her My Friend Flicka. Martin Flavin's Harper ($10,000) prize novel, Journey in the Dark ($2.75), described the degrees by which social success disillusioned a social climber. William Saroyan's The Human Comedy ($2.75), lit with occasional passages of warm humor, became insipid with its determined intellectual baby talk.
Most striking example of the shortcomings of U.S. fiction in 1943 was Jesse Stuart's Taps for Private Tussie ($2.75), in which a story of a Kentucky mountain child's uncanny poetic observation was curdled by a burlesque-show farce of life among his elders. The brilliant portraits of anti-Soviet Author Mark Aldanov's Russian novel, The Fifth Seal ($3), were blurred in the diffuse and incoherent story.
High-ranking among 1943's novels, less by its own accomplishment than because of the mixed quality of the year's fiction, was Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure ($2). By no means equal to his Darkness At Noon, Koestler's latest novel was a graphic account of the sufferings of an ex-Communist for whom a sardonic psychoanalyst tries to provide an easy way out of the struggle against Fascism.